The best Digimodes: Test reveals surprising results

Digital communications with digimodes is a very efficient tool of HF communications. Hams are using RTTY for decades. Since the advent of PSK31 in late 1998, there have been developed a lot of digimodes with special applications in mind. Albeit, RTTY and PSK31 are still very popular.

When I asked myself: “What’s the best mode?”, I couldn’t get a reliable answer. And, really, it depends.

As a result, I made a setup for testing some chat modes on HF channels which are very much different from just flat noisy (AWGN) channels. The results were very much surprising: There are by far better alternatives to RTTY and PSK31 (see table above, reflecting some of the results).

This paper deals with setting up a real-world testbed and presents some results. Anyone is welcomed to replicate the test and/or extend it with other modes. Recent software of W1JHK has made the workflow much easier and faster since then.